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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS % 

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TO WHAT End do High schools 
TEACH English? 



BY 
/ 

SAMUEL THURBER, 

GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS. 



GEORGE A. BACON. 
{^Copyright i8g^, by George A. Bacojt.'] 



TO WHAT END DO HIGH SCHOOLS TEACH 
ENGLISH ? 



What is perhaps a rather widely prevalent miscon- 
ception of the object of the secondary teaching of 
English, was illustrated, the other day, at a meeting 
of high school teachers. I had had occasion to say, 
speaking of certain high school girls, that they seemed 
to me to have achieved fluency and correctness of 
expression in satisfactory measure, and could proceed 
to their next studies without being treated as if their 
composition were in arrears. This elicited from a col- 
lege man who was present the sarcastic remark that 
it might be, "in the next century we were to be 
inundated by a flood of notable female writers." Thus 
my excellent college friend naively revealed his ideal 
of high school achievement in English, and perhaps 
threw light upon a subject on which he could speak 
with more authority, — the actual aim of the professorial 
teaching of English within the college walls. 

Here was an educator in conspicuous position, 
announcing literary distinction as the ambition that 
we teachers of English should aim to foster' in our 
laborious supervision and correction of compositions. 
Before taking in hand this absurd ideal, and trying to 
show its utter irrelevancy to the conditions in which 
we work, I cannot forbear stopping a moment to query, 
— for this is a high school section, and here we are, all 
by ourselves, and can speak, as it were, suh rosa, — 
whether we have not our own problems to solve, and 



whether it is not better for us to solve them without 
too much help. It is a curious manner of speech that 
allows our schools to be spoken of as fitting schools, 
having a chief and determining relation to other schools 
that are to follow. No such presupposition exists in 
the German or the French educational system ; no 
familiar nomenclature exists in the German and French 
languages for translating the terms that express such 
a presupposition. Study the literature of the [/ymyia- 
siiim and the lycee^ and you find the men of those schools 
conferring with each other and with the authorities of 
the State, theorizing, publishing, urging, agitating, 
warning, all in their own bailiwick, as free citizens, 
not as dependents ; considering what the nation needs 
or desires, what a good psychology permits or demands, 
what innovations in school practice the advance of sci- 
ence suggests as feasible, what improvements are called 
for in hygienic conditions : only you do not hear about 
college examinations as a goal of endeavor, due con- 
sideration of which is coming to be neglected. Hence 
I believe the fascination to us Americans of the study 
of pedagogy in the foreign systems and literatures. 
One feels himself there in a clearer atmosphere. Ambi- 
tions are there less clouded with personal strivings for 
distinction. One hears nothing of this or that gym- 
nasium as getting more boys m, or as winning more or 
less honors. 

It is no more true that we prepare youth for college 
than it is that the college carries on the youth whom 
we prepare. The standard of excellence in the school 
is no more relative to the college than the standard of 
excellence in the college is relative to the school. 
Each must find its law in social conditions and in 



psychologic truth. It is our concern that we hitch our 
wagon to a star, just as it is the concern of the college 
also to hitch its wagon to a star. That is, we must 
adjust our theory and practice to our conditions, 
according as these conditions exist as limitations or 
promptings in our total environment. We have to 
study the laws of mind and the organization of the sub- 
jects we teach ; we have to consider, each day, — is this 
or that the better procedure ; we have to interest our 
pupils, and, to that end, to choose from the infinite 
riches of nature, art, and literature, as freely as possi- 
ble, without bias from external disturbers and marplots ; 
we have to pay homage to the science and art of teach- 
ing, in whose domain examinations ah extra are a 
foreign and unassimilable importation, injected and 
intruded as an anarchic element into the life that 
should be permitted to attend to its own business in 
peace and tranquility. 

But to return from my digression, — what is the 
proper ideal for us to keep in mind in our teaching of 
English ? Is it possible that a single high school 
teacher contemplates literary activity as the end and 
aim of his labor in this department ? Is the training of 
notable writers, male or female, a business with which 
we have any concern ? 

Just as much as the high school teacher of astronomy 
aims to give the world a flood of astronomers ; or the 
teacher of history to call into being a multitude of 
historians ; or the teacher of gymnastics to train a 
generation of athletes ; or the teacher of drawing to 
inspire a host of artists ; or the teacher of Latin to 
produce countless classical philologists ; — so much, 
I suppose, is it the function of the English teacher to 



set up for his goal the capacity or the ambition to win 
the regard of the world by the production of literary 
work. Probably no one within the secondary pale 
would have expressed a conception so belated, so ill- 
judged, so out of all relation to the primary concepts 
of pedagogy. Certainly our main concern is to attend 
to our own business, without taking too much advice. 
We must not let our ideas become confused as to the 
object for which we are striving. 

First., — what function have secondary teachers of 
English in common with the other secondary teachers ? 
Secondly, — what function have secondary teachers of 
English peculiar and special to themselves ? 

The high school does not exist to train specialists. 
It deals with youth at that most interesting and 
momentous period of life when intellectual enthusi- 
asms are budding and beginning to bloom ; it deals 
with minds eminently plastic and docile and trustful; 
it deals with wills unsubjugated either by low consid- 
erations of prudence and self-interest or by high altru- 
istic motives of duty to society and the state ; it deals 
with young citizens not yet entered into the arena of 
business competition, not yet knowing, or capable of 
comprehending, the maxims of the market, not yet 
seasoned with that unbelief which puts by the ideals 
of righteousness as being unpractical in this modern 
age. 

The secondary period of education is very different 
from the primary period on the one hand, and from the 
tertiary period on the other. It has its unmistakable 
characteristics — a right to live its own independent 
life and to seek its own laws. The hiofh school must 
be autonomoas if it is to flourish. The youth is neither 



infant nor man. He cannot be dealt with without ref- 
erence to his tastes, as the child must ; nor can he be 
allowed to circumscribe his education within the limits 
of his own desires, as the man may. The great pre- 
suppositions common to all civil life are still the main 
staple of his study. He does not yet choose his pro- 
fession, any more than does the child ; yet his intel- 
lectual yearnings must be noted, respected, and deferred 
to, as must those of the adult man. The secondary 
period is a period of transition, and so is full of con- 
tradiction. Hence perhaps the difficulty of formulating 
a consistent secondary pedagogy, — a task which, how- 
ever, we must either perform ourselves, or consent to 
see performed for us by men not of the guild. 

All secondary teachers must begin by studying the 
youth himself. Then they must consider the total 
environment in society and the state for which the 
youth is to be fitted. From the limitless range of sci- 
ences and arts, languages and literatures, they must 
select the most fundamental, on which various super- 
structures of culture and conviction maybe most solidly 
built. During the years of secondary education the 
youth matures ; and the later years of it are very unlike 
the earlier ones. Hence courses of study must be 
progressive, so as ever to give the newly developed 
powers resistance worthy of their prowess, — something 
to attack and conquer, — in order that the conscious- 
ness of victory and achievement may be awaked, and 
so may serve to invigorate all the faculties for new 
efforts. The pugnacity and the wilfulness of boys and 
the patience and complaisance of girls must have their 
due recognition and employment. The too easily aroused 
base motive of desire to beat each other must be taught 



6 

to yield to the high motive of desire to beat things. 
The problems of science and the tasks of art lead the 
striving mind only upward. The shrewdness that looks 
to the beating of an examiner usually squints towards 
knavery. In this point we secondary teachers have a 
clear and distinct duty. Our relations involve the 
ever present danger of overgrowth of personal competi- 
tion. Personal competition is to the struggle with 
objective difiticulties very much what drunkenness is to 
inspiration. 

The child in the primary school is always supervised; 
if he is given something to do, the teacher looks on 
while he does it. The young man in college is practi- 
cally never supervised : he is given something to do, 
and is then left to himself to do it or to devise ways of 
not doing it. The youth in the high school is treated 
perhaps too much like the primarian. The true func- 
tion of the secondary teacher is to enlist the interest of 
the pupil so that he shall address himself to his work 
from an inner motive of his own. A great boy or girl 
studying at a little desk, in a row with other boys and 
girls, under the eye of a teacher, is a queer spectacle, 
if you will view it from the vantage-ground of reason. 
Our ideas of what constitutes a school are largely con- 
ventional, inheiited from primitive times and conditions. 
A master or a mistress keeping order in a flock of 
youth, and hearing recitations, is about the sum and 
substance of the prevailing idea of a school. And so 
tyrannical are in our minds the connotations of the 
term c/ass, that we ignore the individual, and try to 
teach groups, as if groups were teachable entities. 
This idea yields all too slowly to the conception of 
individual youth pursuing lines of study and investiga- 



tion, with the teacher at hand to guide, to stimulate, to 
praise. 

You see I can hardly tear myself away from the 
allurements of the general part of my theme, which is 
only preliminary to the special business on which I 
came here at your kind invitation. To this I must at 
once proceed. 

To the teacher of English falls a triple function. 
He is to introduce his pupils to English literature ; he 
is to awaken the dormant language sense, the linguistic 
consciousness, with reference to the mother tongue ; he 
is to stimulate and direct the ambition for neat and 
comely expression. These three elements, distinct and 
separable both in theory and in practice, find their 
common principle in the obvious fact that they deal 
with the language and with the thought that is 
expressed in it, or with the art of expressing in it 
thought that is new and original. 

I. With regard to English literature^ the secondary 
education should aim to give a conspectus of the five 
centuries that begin with the age of Chaucer and 
Wy cliff e. 

If the teacher knows his subject, he will dispense 
with text-books of literary history, in which all the 
members of a class simultaneously learn the same les- 
sons, and will use the method of researcli^giving many 
topics for exploration^^ending pupils to many books, ^^^_ 
and requiring reports in writing or in oral speech. 
There is here no possible forward marching by platoon 
front ; the individual must find his own way, not rely- 
ing on the touch of elbows, but examining with his 
own eyes the ground he comes to, " and with his own 
judgment planning his next steps. The thing to 



eliminate from the recitation is identity of preparation. 
Nowhere but in the despotism of school duress, can 
thirty young people be brought together all prepared 
to say the same things. Absolutely the exercise must 
not be allowed to become uninteresting and monoto- 
nous. Thirty pupils do no more than one, if all do the 
same things ; but thirty pupils do thirty times as much 
as one if each does a different thing from any other. 
The only limitation this procedure finds in practice is 
the lack of time for listening to what so many have to 
say. When each has made his own discovery, he will 
not be apt to acquiesce in the loss of his chance to 
make his report. Tlie clock is merciless. Each should 
have his opportunity at once, and so it is better to keep 
a rein on this exercise, lest it run away with all the 
English time. V 

The conspectus of five centuries of English literature 
that may be contemplated as -feasible in the secondary 
course must be modestly planned. I would consider 
only four periods, — the Early period, coming down to 
the middle of the sixteenth century ; the Elizabethan, 
taking in Milton, (but not Drj^den^ the Eighteenth cen- 
tury, including Dryden and Butler, and ending with 
Cowper[/ and the Modern.^ These periods can be 
characterized with sufficient distinctness for high school 
pupils to appreciate their differences./^ Pupils will make 
acquaintance with them through the specimens which 
they will read in class. It will be the teacher's busi- 
ness to direct the choice of these specimens, and to 
bring out by his hints and suggestions the waj's in 
which they relate themselves to and illustrate the 
period to which they belong. High school pupils can 
understand that Coriolanus could not have been pro- 



9 

duced in the same century with Cato, Comus under the 
same influences as Hudibras, Pilgrim's Progress in the 
same environment as the Sentimental Journey, or either 
of these simultaneously with Childe Harold. ^;^^ 

I wish here to enter my earnest protest against the 
assumption that high school youth are not grown up to 
a perception of the broad and obvious historical rela- 
tions and characteristic differences of literary periods. 
This assumption is made by the college requirements, 
which prescribe unrelated atoms of reading, under the 
most unnatural and crudely conceived stress and strain 
of anticipated compositions on themes of remembered 
matter. V What the youth can discover and understand 
it is proper to say he has a natural right to be put in 
the way of meeting. Feeble methods in education 
always address the memory. An examination gropes 
for the residuum which a mental process has left in the 
memory. If the mental process has been conducted 
under anticipation of an examination, it has labored 
under an incubus, and has probably been checked mid- 
way, its spontaneity thwarted, its results spoiled. 

It may be a startling proposition to announce to an 
audience of educators, — though to teachers I believe 
it will not be unacceptable, — that young people in 
school, like mature people out of school, can perform 
mental operations best when their minds are not filled 
with anxiety and terror. If you desire to have a piece 
of work well done, begin by announcing, or have it 
definitely understood as your habitual procedure, that 
you are not going to subject the results to an examina- 
tion No memorable literary work was ever inspired 
by the offer of a great honorarium, and no good effort 
is ever prompted in school by the desire for class rank. 



10 

Examinations are a recent innovation in education. 
Paulsen reminds us that Goethe and Schiller and the 
great German philosophers were never examined. As 
historical pedagogy is studied, examinations will inevita- 
bly tend to fade from the professional consciousness, 
for the simple reason that we shall become accustomed 
to trace valiant educational effort through centuries 
that had not yet even invented examinations. 

The pupil's writing, in a course of literature, should 
be, not in the form of examinations, but in the form 
of theses, or reports of explorations, drawn up with a 
prime purpose to make known to a listening auditory 
what the explorer has done. The existence of this 
prime purpose is all important. The youth has no 
business to write until he has something to communi- 
cate, and a desire to make the communication to a pub- 
lic of his peers. The English of this thesis or report 
constitutes a secondary purpose. The thesis should be 
well written, as a matter of course, just as it should be 
well pronounced in delivery, and just as the reader 
should be neatly dressed. 

Even when it has the best imaginable opportunity, 
the course in literature must select a very small num- 
ber of authors for reading in the class. Yet many 
authors can be made the objects of research, the aim 
being to find passages illustrative of their lives, their 
relations to their contemporaries, and of the form and 
content of their works. Here the teacher must know 
his ground, and start the learner on fruitful lines. It 
does not follow, however, that the teacher must have 
everything cut and dried. It is easy to overdo a direc- 
tion. The question-cues must be mere starters. E. g. ; 
Do you agree with Jolinson and Macaulay as to the 



11 

absurdity of Mrs. Thrale's second marriage ? Why 
should Bunyan and Milton not have been intimate ? 
What did Thomas Gray probably think of Samuel 
Johnson? Compare Goldsmith's life and Gray's. Find 
portraits illustrating Elizabethan peaked beards and 
ruffs and eighteenth-century shaven faces and wigs. 
Show us Fanny Burney, George III., Queen Charlotte, 
Garrick, Sir Joshua, Dr. Burney, etc., etc. Did Words- 
worth show appreciation of Burns? Did Milton show 
appreciation of Shakespeare ? Compare a specimen of 
Milton's prose with a specimen of Dryden's. Compare 
Twickenham and Strawberiy Hill with the homes of 
Wordsworth and Tennyson. Find illustrations of 
Cowper's playfulness, of his domesticity, of his indigna- 
tion, of his melancholy, of his piety. Take us to a 
coffee house of Queen Anne's time. Has our prose 
grown more or less regular and precise since Addison 
wrote ? Are Elizabethan poetic forms, or eighteenth- 
century poetic forms, the more in vogue in the modern 
period? Was Shakespeare played and read in London 
in the eighteenth century ? Show us a portrait of Mrs. 
Siddons, and tell some anecdotes of her. Find pict- 
ures and descriptions to illustrate Keramos. Read to 
the class Johnson's parallel between Pope and Dryden, 
and comment on its form and content. Do the same 
for the classic lona passage in the Journey to the West- 
ern Islands. Compare Johnson's ideas of a newspaper, 
as expressed in the last Rambler, with the modern 
newspaper ideal. Organize some of your classmates 
into a company to play scenes from Goldsmith's and 
Sheridan's comedies. In a similar way present the 
Masque of Pandora. Was Comus ever put on the pub- 
lic stage ? What contemporary English writers did 



12 

Benjamin Franklin read? On what English writers 
might Franklin, during his earlier and later residences 
in London, have called ; and how would he probably 
have been received by them? What English writers 
did Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Lowell meet in 
their visits to England? What famous English writers 
have visited this country ? Correct Macaulay's estimate 
of Steele by reference to more impartial authorities. 
Give a rdsum^ of Masson's Life of Chatterton. Imag- 
ine an interview between Goldsmith and Chatterton. 
Set forth the case of the disputed authorship of The 
Ode to the Cuckoo. What facts of Milton's life could 
we ascertain from his English poems ? Collect from 
Milton's poems the passages that illustrate his view of 
the position and influence of woman. Present the 
historical associations connected with the site of Bar- 
clay & Perkins's brewery. Trace the custom of tea- 
drinking by the allusions to it in English literature. 
Compare the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as to 
their ways of viewing Alpine scenery. Look up fore- 
shadowings of Wordsworth in Gray. Make a collec- 
tion of Wordsworth's strongest lines. Investigate 
euphuism, not by reading an article on the subject, but 
by exploring the writings of Lyly himself. Collect 
examples of the warm and passionate language in which 
friendship between men was wont to express itself in 
the times of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. Present 
the Macpherson-Ossian business, with illustrations of 
the Ossianic language. What prose fiction would a 
person have found to amuse himself with, in 1600, in 
1650, in 1700, etc. ? Read a chapter of the Bible in 
the several standard versions and report your observa- 
tions as to the development of its language. Read a 



13 

book of Tudor or Stuart times, and comment on its 
style and diction. Make a collection of interesting 
word-forms and phrases from Chaucer. 

These are a few specimens of the endless profusion 
of topics suitable for secondary exploration. For lower 
classes topics more easy and obvious, and for the 
maturest and most energetic pupils, topics much more 
difficult, may be devised. 

The object of such educational researches is of course 
attained in the very act and process of searching ; so 
that a vigorous quest may be said to have succeeded, 
educationally, even though the object sought be not 
found ; just as a fishing-expedition has manifold intel- 
lectual and physical results, even though no fish be 
caught. One attends lectures with but little profit: 
whatever one ultimately learns of literature, he achieves, 
not by listening to the tales of explorers, but by explor- 
ing. So it may be said, the learner never searches in 
vain : if he does not find one particular thing, he finds 
a good many others perhaps more important. 

Yet the wise teacher will remember that to the young 
searcher success is the main stimulus and reward. 
Problems of research, therefore, must not be too per- 
plexing. Such problems should have a distinct and 
unmistakable issue not too far away. The younger the 
learner, the smaller the area he should be asked to 
range over. And of course, if the pupils finally give 
up their search and acknowledge themselves defeated, 
the teacher must be ready to show them how they 
might have succeeded, and what beautiful things they 
might have found for themselves. 

In all this teaching of English literature the teacher 
must be the unifying principle, referring all details and 



14 

particulars to their just place in the whole, and keep- 
ing the pupils' attention ever alert for indications of 
historic time. The teacher being present, intent on 
this business, there will be no need of further sys- 
tematizing the work. We are too much afraid of 
desultoriness. It is a great note of the schoolmasterly- 
mind to schematize, to skeletonize, to paradigmatize, 
all the matter of instruction. Hence school-masters' 
books, the so-called text-books, are notably devoid of 
interest for the public at large ; and when some one 
makes a book for schools that is consecutive and reada- 
ble, as Mr. John Fiske did in his Civil Government^ 
teachers look upon it askance because the skeleton in 
it is not immediately visible. Spontaneity is better 
than any parade of method. The instruction will have 
system, that is, it will stand together as a whole, pro- 
vided it issue from one clear insight into the nature of 
the intended result. The more original the teachings 
the more vain to ask the teacher for his syllabus. 

Thus while we teach English literature, our aim isY^^ 
to make the youth acquainted with English literature^ 
— not merely with a few atoms and fragments of it, 
but, so far as our opportunity and the capacity of our 
pupils allow, with the entirety of it as a growth and 
organism, which visibly changes from century to cen- 
tury, and in which Chaucer and Tennyson are linked 
together, not merely as chance additions to a great 
aggregate, but as fellow members of one race, living 
far apart in time,/but close together in soul, in speech,, 
in poetic power. J 

The English teacher must be fully imbued with a 
r sense of the greatness of the great writers. Above all 
\ things, he must appreciate Shakespeare, and inculcate 



15 

belief in the poet's superiority over all else in litera- 
ture. Not many persons have explored the literatures 
of the world so thoroughly as to know, of their own 
knowledge, that any one writer is absolutely unap- 
proached ; but the older one grows, and the more one 
reads, the more one comes to feel that this common 
convention, this universal agreement of the modern 
world to acknowledge the supremacy of Shakespeare, 
is just. Of course, in teaching, this convention becomes 
one of the leading motives. It should be taught like 
an article of a creed, with all reverence, to be explained, 
but not to be subjected to doubt. All writers, in fact, 
with whom it is worth while to deal in school at all, 
should be treated with honor. A pupil's impression of 
Pope, e. (/., should not be suffered to remain such as one 
gets from reading Macaulay's essay on Addison ; nor 
should pupils be allowed to imagine a moment that 
Macaulay's own fame as a writer is to be snuffed out 
by modern epigram directed against his style or his 
historical accuracy. 

High school pupils are always deficient in a sense for 
rhythm, and so fail to appreciate poetic form. Hence 
an important part of the course in literature has to deal 
with verse as such, temporarily leaving matter and con- 
tent in abeyance. The five-foot iambic line is the 
material of which the great mass of our verse is built. 
To study the nature of the five-foot iambic is to lay the 
foundation for appreciation of English poetry in gen- 
eral. Blank verse, the heroic couplet, the sonnet, are 
all made of five-foot iambics. Therefore, if our time is 
too scant to enable us to do much with poetics at large, 
we absolutely must pay homage to this verse form, and 
make our pupils chant it, scan it, dwell on it, till they 



16 

become skilled in running with its movement and 
incapable of blundering on the accent. It is solely a 
matter of training. Poetry is not amorphous philoso- 
phy or narrative, and must not be read with sole refer- 
ence to sentence-structure and punctuation marks. I 
am not afraid of a little sing-song. To read verse as if 
the form were an indelicate matter, that should be hid- 
den as much as possible beneath the logical pausing, is 
not to imitate the rhapsodists. One does not dance for 
the purpose of getting there, or sing to make known 
one's opinion. 

II. Coming to the second element of the English 
teacher's function, — instruction in the language^ — it 
must be said that it is not possible to teach the mother 
tongue in any such way as to make the study yield the 
peculiar mental discipline that comes from drill in the 
forms of a more highly inflected speech. The study of 
Latin or German seems to me absolutely essential as a 
prerequisite to the secondary study of English. French 
is much better than no foreign language at all, and 
German is far better than Latin. Of Latin, experience 
seems to me to show that high school pupils are sure to 
get too little to serve as an appreciable quantity in the 
sum of their culture. Of German they get a very sub- 
stantial knowledge. The near kinship of English and 
German makes each language fruitfully illustrate the 
other to the youthful comprehension. For one thing, 
the presence in the two languages of the same set of 
fi'oeterito-prcesentia verbs enables the German to throw 
most valuable light upon the English. 

English is infiectionless now, but was not always so. 
The subjunctive, e. ^., has almost disappeared. It does 
not follow, however, that the subjunctive forms being 



17 

lost, the verbs that once were in the subjunctive are 
henceforth in the indicative. We have a plenty of 
subjunctive locutions still. Milton and Shakespeare 
had far more than we have. Being often invisible to 
the eye, the subjunctive in modern English is a more 
subtle and elusive thing to find than are the hypotheti- 
cal modes in Greek and Latin. It is an excellent hiofh 
school exercise to detect these essentially subjunctive 
relations in modern and in Elizabethan speech. Let 
the pupil consider, e. //., whethei" / might he admitted in 
All's Well, IV., V. 94, and Imijiht he admitted in Twelfth 
Night, I., i., 24, are to be parsed as being in the same 
mode. I may be wrong, but I believe botli these verbs 
are still parsed as being in the " potential " mode. The 
ability to make such distinctions as this is quite within 
the competency of high school youth ; and it is proper 
to say that whatever is clearly right, inherently inter- 
esting, and fully within the reach of youth making only 
wholesome effort, the youth have a natural right to the 
opportunity of knowing. 

Some of the results of historical English grammar, 
then, the English teacher ought to be able to communi- 
cate to his pupils, and ought to communicate to them, 
in stimulating ways, leaving them half the journey to 
make for themselves, and not systematically, but as 
occasion serves. He shouhl eradicate the superstition 
of a "potential" mode. He should teach how to d 
tinguish between racy idiom and ancient blunder. He 
should know how to strike the right tone of relish and 
insight in dealing with the uncouth forms of Wycliffe's 
version, of the Paston Letters, of Sir Thomas Malory ; 
with the archaisms of Spenser, and with the vulgarisms 
of Bunyan. He should not forget what of good tem- 



on / 

IS- \ 



18 

per and forbearance is due even to the innovators who 
pronounce had rather and had as lief ignoble forms that 
should give way to the more parsable would rather and 
woidd as soon. 

One of the countless pleasant memories that I con- 
nect with the days of my schoolboyhood is of analyzing 
sentences according^ to the formulas of the late S. S. 
Greene. Now, I cannot quite get over the feeling that 
that analysis was a good thing for us boys. Doubtless 
it was carried into absurd schoolmasterly refinements, — 
for its author was notably a schoolmaster first, and a 
student only at many removes from that, — and was 
mechanical in its plan, and too little stimulating to 
curiosity. Yet it was a good thing, or the germ of one. 
Something we teachers of English should surely do to 
nurse the sentence seyise^ the great safeguard of the 
writer of English. The thought can be uttered only 
in the sentence ; the thought is the sentence. The 
categories of the sentence-structure are the categories 
of the thought-process. The child constructs sentences 
unconsciously; the youth analyzes sentences into their 
elements ; the adult studies the science of thought. ) 
The high school graduate should be incapable of writ- 3 
ing, with the outward forms of sentences, groups of 
words that are not sentences. The sentence-feeling in 
trained perfection might almost be adopted as the goal 
of endeavor in secondary English teaching. Then the 
habit of viewing the sentence analytically naturally 
begets the complementary habit of viewing it syntheti- 
cally ; and the ability to apprehend sentences of unusual 
length as wholes facilitates the reading of such writers 
as Milton, Clarendon, Hooker and Ruskin, and renders 
all reading of archaic matter more fruitful and pleasing. 



19 

In practice I would confine the study of sentence analy- 
sis to the nomenclature that is universally recognized. 
Such whimsical technicalities as Mr. Greene propounded 
had better be avoided. 

III. With regard to composition^ the third of the 
main functions assigned by present usage to the English 
teacher, there would be much to say did time permit. 
This subject has of late been made prominent by the 
complaints of the colleges. Even colleges that strenu- 
ously refuse to admit on certificate, but insist on exam- 
ining candidates, find themselves surcharged with poor 
writers, to teach whom the very elements, tlie primary 
rudiments of decent writing, they must employ a force 
of instructors, and so descend from the true college 
function to do the work legitimately belonging to the 
schooJ. The great query with regard to these belated 
youth is, — how did they ever pass the examination in 
English and get into college. I am sure of this, — that 
youth will write carefully and neatly, as soon as they 
are convinced that they must ; and that they will abso- 
lutely make no effort in this direction beyond the point 
that they know will suffice. A young man fitting for 
college is a busy person, and economizes his effort and 
his time by keen instinct. The coming examination 
he discounts exactly. Girls you can work up to beau- 
tiful zeal for nice work. Boys tie no ribbons on their 
themes, they weep not over censure, they sit not up 
nights to copy and recopy in their anxiety to please 
you. The examination is their goal, and whatsoever 
is more than that cometh of evil. In the very nature 
of things an examination works two ways : if it draws 
pupils up to its level, at the same time it prevents them 
from rising higher. Why do you set an examination, 



20 

if you mean to speak contemptuously of it as a stand- 
ard, and exhort learners to go beyond its requirements ? 
An examination is a thing to be passed, not at all to be 
surpassed. Those who have passed the college examina- 
tion should of course have the college guarantee, and 
be by the college protected against the flings of a carp- 
ing world. 

The only thing to do in the matter of compositions 
is to be exacting. If a pupil can do excellent work in 
his other studies, but remains a sloven in his English 
writing, — the case is hardly supposable, — refuse him 
promotion. Other studies may be merged and mingled 
together in an average ; but English should be a cate- 
gory by itself : without good English not even the 
most brilliant scholarship should suffice. English 
composition concerns the form in which work is done 
in all departments ; and it is perfectly just to insist as 
much upon propriety of form as upon propriety of sub- 
stance and content. If a pupil writes upon a Sunday- 
school picnic, will you suffer a profound respect in his 
mind for the matter of his communication to dwarf all 
consideration for its appearance ? Pupils usually know 
a good deal more about how to write than they are 
willing to reduce to practice. They must have some 
spur to rouse them to an effort. In prepai'atory schools 
the college examination tends to thwart the application 
of any such spur. In other schools the stimulus can be 
devised easily enough if all the teachers can agree as to 
its importance. 

I was amused to see in a newspaper the suggestion 
that pupils sliould be required to write something very 
frequently. The fact is, in almost any modern school 
pupils are writing about half the time. The daily 



21 

emptyings of the waste-baskets reveal lecture-notes, 
reading-notes, first drafts, solutions, memorandums, 
notes of request for sundry permissions and exemp- 
tions, — in fact, a deal of skimble-skamble stuff of 
indescribable variety, — almost all of it composition. 
This, of course, cannot come under the teacher's eye. 
It is vast in quantity, utterly formless in execution. 
So constant is it as an element of school life, that the 
merely occasional composition stands no chance beside 
it of exerting a determining influence on the aggregate 
of habit which the pupil is forming. 

Evidently the thing to do in this case is to diminish 
the amount of this illegitimate scribbling. A girl told 
me that she wrote one hundred and fifty pages of notes 
of matter dictated by a teacher in the way of lecture, 
and that her penmanship had been pretty much wrecked 
in the process. She had to write under stress and 
strain. She acquired a certain habitual reckless gait 
and pace, which now she cannot put aside. She was 
too young for such an exercise. This taking of notes, 
I venture to say, is needless in secondary education. 
Then if a pupil is to read something and report on it, 
encourage him to trust his memory and deliver himself 
orally, without notes. Girls will copy out pages of 
books to read to the class. When the matter is histori- 
cal or biographical, the copying is not only superfluous, 
it is pernicious. The high school girl is like Hamlet : 
when she is moved, her impulse is, " My tables, meet it 
is I set it down." 

The scribbling cannot, of course, be wholly done 
away with, but it can be diminished in amount. Then 
all the teachers should equally be teachers of composi- 
tion. Certainly, pupils compose for every teacher. If 



22 

the teachers are cultivated persons, they surely know 
enough about good English. Every exercise should be 
viewed for its English as well as for its exhibition of 
knowledge or skill. That one teacher should be bur- 
dened with more than his quota of compositions is 
wrong. This is no special art, requiring peculiar 
knowledge. Is there any high school teacher who is 
not a lady or a gentleman ? Is there any such teacher 
who would acknowledge himself less competent than 
the rest to observe and to reprove faults in morals, 
faults in manners, faults in spoken speech ? 

The written matter that a pupil produces in each 
department should, so far as is possible, come for cen- 
sure before the teacher in that department ; for censure 
both as to form and as to content ; the content to have 
no recognition or reward unless the form is satisfactory. 
A teacher should be like a royal personfige, who 
receives no callers that do not strictly observe the eti- 
quette of dress prescribed by custom ; and not a com- 
mon, familiar companion, for whom anything is good 
enough. 

Then the compositions on topics of a general charac- 
ter, such as do not come within the province of a 
special teacher, — and there should, of course, be a 
good many such compositions, — might properly be 
divided equally among all the teachers. Or the pupils 
might be apportioned to the teachers at the beginning 
of the year. Suppose there should be thirty-five to a 
teacher. Each teacher would then have his class of 
thirty-five in composition, and would soon find out how 
many exercises he could have them write and he get 
time to supervise with due care and deliberation. If 
each pupil writes once a week, the teacher will have 
seven themes a day to read, — an hour's work ; though, 



23 

as weekly themes would be short ones, it might well 
be that he would learn to read them at a little quicker 
rate. 

Now let me say, — and my experience in this matter 
is considerable, — that seven themes a day is quite as 
much as any teacher ought to undertake. I have set- 
tled down to the basis of an hour for five, and even this 
average I find is made possible only by the fact that 
most of the themes require but little attention. Seven 
per day, when the exercises are short, is enough. 
Probably some teachers would push them all forward 
to Saturday and then make a grand crush of them, with 
groanings and imprecations. But that would be wrong 
every way. It is essential to give a written theme back 
to its writer almost instantly. It is a fatal laches tO' 
let days intervene between the theme and the criticism. 
Seven themes a day will hurt no one, but rather prove 
pleasing and useful to many a teacher whose sense of 
form in language is jaded and needs reviving. 

I am utterly unwilling to say a word in favor of the i 
plan now most in vogue, of imposing the composition 
work of scores of pupils upon a single teacher already 
keeping full class hours like the rest, and, like the rest, 
having his daily preparations to make. To style one 
an English teacher is not to confer on one any special 
ability to resist the hebetating influences of excessive 
work over themes. The English teacher must protect 
himself, and naturally will protect himself. If he pro- 
fesses to be reading a great many themes daily, it will 
be well to inquire how he reads them, and how impress- 
ive he makes his comment to the young writers. If 
the results of English composition teaching are unsat- 
isfactory, something else must be done than trying to 
squeeze more theme-reading out of the English teacher 



24 

He reads too many themes already. My agreement 
with President Eliot in his general reformatory tenden- 
cies comes so near being unqualified, that I regret the 
necessity of dissenting from liis plan for easing the 
English teacher. President Eliot's plan might be 
called a j^hase of the ancient Lancasterian method. 
The trouble with it would be that the monitors, — who 
in this case would be attaches of the school, employed 
at low compensation for the special duty of theme- 
reading, — would surely sink into a low caste and 
become helots. The English teacher himself, no mat- 
ter how scholarly and fine-mannered, would at once 
become a pariah, Avere his function to be confined to 
theme reading and marking. Nothing will do but that 
the themes be read by men and women for whom the 
youth have the fullest respect and regard. 

I do not see how the teachino' of Enoiish writing^ is 
to be much improved except by improving the tone of 
the schools ; and the tone of the schools is to be raised 
only by enlisting in the work all the teachers. The 
fitting for examinations is an influence constantl}^ tend- 
ing to debase tone. Where a corps of teachers is 
unanimous and resolute, all things are possible. 

The main lines in which reform of composition teach- 
ing must move are then, 1st, Repression of irresponsi- 
ble, destructive scribbling ; 2nd, Enlargement and 
increase of responsible, educative writing. Writing, 
to have value as a factor in education, must be the 
expression of a positive mental content that is worth 
communicating and naturally seeks utterance. It must 
have its opportunity ; it must not be driven and forced 
up to high speed. Just what to do to prepare for a 
college examination in English, I do not know : the 
thing lies outside the domain of pedagogic science. 




X 



